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This past Christmas I spent pretty much the entire morning trying to fix the girlfriend's OnePlus 5. Its native version of Android, OxygenOS, had just gotten a big upgrade to Oreo, and as we were shortly going on holiday I thought it prudent to get her phone up to date before we left.

Bad idea.

The upgrade itself wasn't the problem; what stymied me for several hours was applying root and getting a custom recovery to stick. I still couldn't tell you what the technical issue was, but I've a sneaking suspicion that it's the result of Google's increasing hostility towards Android modders.

I knew that the only real solution would be a regression to Android Nougat, but then my better half would have to deal with the constant nagging notification for an update that would once again break superuser access to her phone.

And here's where FreedomOS comes in. It's a custom ROM built on the Nougat version of Oxygen, but with a modified kernel and additional options. Chief among them is the Aroma installer; it gives you the choice of flashing Magisk or SuperSU for root, and also allows you to debloat your device by skipping over any Google or OnePlus apps you don't want. It's definitely not for noobs, though, as its possible flash a broken system image onto your phone if you don't pay attention to what you're doing.

The lead developer recently returned from a holiday break, so an Oreo version of FOS—for the OnePlus 5, at least—could be on the way. In the meantime, I've been impressed enough with the Nougat version that I flashed the 5T version onto my own phone. You can check out the ROM for yourself at the XDA links immediately below.

Researchers at Northeastern University have developed an app that can tell you which services are being throttled by your wireless carrier, and by how much. It's called Wehe, and it's only available for Android. Find out why below.

How it works is fairly ingenious. Using YouTube as an example, Wehe spoofs that app for a random download, then repeats the download but with different metadata, fooling your carrier into thinking it's from another source. By comparing speeds you can determine if and by how much your YouTube videos are being throttled. In the case of BingeOn it's been shown that T-Mobile indiscriminately throttles all video to 1.5 Mbps, and with YouTube specifically limits video resolution to 360p.

Wehe is currently able to test the following services via their apps:

Amazon
NBC Sports
Netflix
Skype
Spotify
Vimeo
YouTube

And what about iOS? Well, according to Motherboard Apple won't approve it. An App Store reviewer told the developers that Wehe "has no direct benefits to the user". Because carriers, I guess...

Hopefully Wehe will find its way to APKMirror and/or F-Droid should Google ever come to a similar determination; in the meantime you can grab it on Google Play at the first link directly below.

Some slides from Motorola's upcoming presentation at Mobile World Congress seem to have leaked to Droid Life... or maybe all of them? If the source is legit we can at least have an advanced look at this year's updated hardware designs.

No other information is available for Moto's traditional flagship. However, from the graphic above we can see an Essential/iPhone-esque notch at the top of the screen and some sort of software navigation bar at the bottom.

Anyone remember the Motorola Atrix 4G Lapdock? Here's a new iteration of that same idea, with a unique twist: while bringing the empty shell of a notebook computer to life your smartphone also does double duty as an oversized trackpad for that same notebook.

Razer showed off a prototype of this oversized accessory for their flagship Android phone at CES; it currently goes by the name Project Linda. The Verge got an early peek, and seemed impressed with how well it all worked:

Hooking up the Razer Phone to Project Linda is simple: place the phone into the slot, and press a hardware button that causes a USB-C port to extend directly into the Razer Phone, simultaneously locking it in place. The entire hardware is powered off the phone; all the Project Linda base contributes is some extra storage space (around 200GB on the current prototype) and extra batteries, so the Razer Phone charges the entire time it’s docked.

The phone actually does triple duty here—in addition to bringing the notebook to life and serving as its trackpad it also provides audio via its front-facing speakers. There is a separate webcam above the larger 13-inch QHD display, which is a good thing; using the phone's front-facing camera in this setup would give your video chat partner a view of your chin and nostrils only.

Fyi, any time I lead off with this captioned photo of Carl Pei it's probably going to be bad news...

Last week a customer took to the OnePlus Forums to post about suspicious charges on two of their credit cards, both of which were used for purchases at OnePlus.net last November. It turns out he is not alone; to date some 69 users have reported similar fraudulent charges, and it's looking increasingly likely that the upstart Android OEM's payment portal has been compromised.

For a company that only sells its products online to most of the world, this is understandably a big concern—even if the number of affected customers is so far relatively small.

The payment page which requests the customer’s card details is hosted on-site and is not an iFrame by a third-party payment processor. This means all payment details entered, albeit briefly, flow through the OnePlus website and can be intercepted by an attacker. Whilst the payment details are sent off to a third-party provider upon form submission, there is a window in which malicious code is able to siphon credit card details before the data is encrypted.

The working theory at Fidus is that the credit card numbers were intercepted not by client-side attacks via javascript, but instead a server-side compromise via PHP. But if this were the case then I'd expect a lot more fraudulent charges to be reported.

If, like me, you paid for your OnePlus purchase using PayPal then your credit card info should be safe. If I recall correctly, PayPal was the only available option for my last few orders; in light of this news I'm pretty grateful for that!

One more bit of Japanese gadget porn before we return to our regular schedule of mobile-related news...

I don't use Windows but I've always had a thing for Panasonic's Japan-only Let's Note laptops. Maybe it's the circular trackpad and array, the silver chassis or the exotic etchings on the bright white keyboard... I've just always found them rather fetching. And on my recent visit to Kyoto and a mandatory stop at Yodobashi Camera I came across something new, or at least new to me: this CF-XZ lets the user detach the notebook's touch screen from the keyboard.

It's a design that makes a lot more sense to me than an unnecessarily thick laptop with a base and keyboard folded behind; in operation it looks like this:

Not sure whether that accessory that locks the screen to the base is included or not.

The Let's Note CF-XZ has an Intel Core i5 7200U processor powering its 12-inch QHD screen. There are three separate models, each with some combination of a 128 or 256 GB SSD and Windows 10 Home or Pro. All models come with 8 GB of RAM. If anyone can find evidence of it running a recent version of Ubuntu or Linux Mint please let me know!

My opinion on smartwatches hasn't changed; while their mission statement may be to show you phone notifications on your wrist, I still firmly believe that their killer feature is the ability to customize your watch face to match your band, clothing, mood or whatever. This monochrome watch, spied by yours truly at Tokyu Hands in Osaka, Japan, takes that customization up a notch with an e-ink band to complement its e-ink display.

It's called the FES Watch, which I can only assume is an acronym for Fashion Entertainments and Sony. There are currently two separate product lines, the regular FES Watch available in either black or white, and the more premium FES Watch U, which I'm guessing stands for "Unlimited", and here's why: the regular FES watch has 24 separate watch/band combinations which can be cycled through with repeated presses of the watch's only button. The FES Watch U has a companion app for Android and iOS that can sideload and customize many more faces and bands via Bluetooth. Here's a demo of how that works:

It even looks like you can use a photo taken with your smartphone as a background for the watch, making me really wish I had brought one home with me. Then again, there doesn't seem to be any ability to display notifications from your phone. If Sony ever decided to add that functionality it would instantly make the FES Watch U a pretty compelling smartwatch.

Yes, your humble news servant will once again be visiting Japan (Osaka and Kyoto this time) for the next week or so, with a stop in Hong Kong on the way home. I should be back on duty by Monday, January 15th at the very latest... See you in 2018!

As you can probably guess, there's a more accurate means to determine your strength of your phone's cellular radio than that icon in your status bar. On Android you can find numerical values, measured in dBM and asu as in the grabbed screen above, by navigating through your phone as follows:

Settings > About phone > Status > SIM status

While you could make the argument that Google is already doing a pretty good job of hiding this information from the user, a curious new commit to Android P discovered by XDA would suggest that it could be removed altogether. The reason for doing so can be found in a comment on the commit:

Code:

Hide signal strength when told by carrier

Ok Google, you suck.

The good news is that the relevant APIs are unaffected—meaning that third-party Android apps like LTE Discovery and Signal Strength can still retrieve this data for the user.

At best, carriers might simply wish for their Android offerings to be less geeky and intimidating for new users; at worse they don't want any attention drawn to their sub-par networks. For me, it's yet another reason to steer well clear of carrier-branded hardware.

I'll never forget this one telephone exchange I had with Rogers. It was the mid-2000s and I was calling to cancel my cable package; after several minutes on hold with retentions, a rep came on the line to make me a final offer:

"Listen, you've been a loyal customer for over a decade, and you've never made a late payment. What would you say if I told you I could knock a full third off of your cable bill?"

BCE spokesman Mark Langton pointed to the busy shopping season and said, "We respond to promotional action in the market and have our own holiday offers at Bell Mobility and Virgin, now and during Boxing Week. We have other offers on now and there will be more through the rest of the season."

Rogers also cited the holidays, and spokeswoman Sarah Schmidt added: "We'll continue to offer time-limited promotions to meet the different needs of our customers."

Telus did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

I was sure that I'd read somewhere about someone from Telus saying that they were responding to a regional offer by a competitor, which is actually closer to the truth than anything above. Unfortunately I can't find a citation for that. But the important thing is that Canada has a new benchmark for smartphone plans and what they should cost. To borrow a slogan from WIND Mobile, that's a holiday miracle!

The fan site Nokiamob brings news of a new IDC report on global smartphone shipments, in which Nokia and Xiaomi are singled out for impressive 50% year over year growth. Feature phones still account for much of Nokia's consumer business, but industry expert (and former Nokia exec) Tomi Ahonen estimates that HMD Global will end up shipping well over 10 million Nokia-branded Android handsets by the end of 2017.

That's fairly impressive for a brand that only barely has a retail presence here in the Americas. But how does it compare to Google's Pixel, the must-have sidearm for the serious Android fanboy? Pretty well, as it turns out—assuming that the one available data point for Pixel sales is accurate.

Back in June Ron Amadeo of Ars Technica observed that downloads for the Pixel Launcher had just crossed the threshold for 1-5 million installations. That achievement took a full 8 months; even with improved second-generation hardware I don't see how Google could possibly move more than 2 million Pixels by the end of the year... Which means that Nokia smartphones could potentially outsell Google-branded ones by as much as 5 times.

Oh, and if you're wondering where Nokia's sales are coming from, Tomi Ahonen lists China, Germany, India, Indonesia and Russia as its top five markets.